Independent Investigative Journalism Since 1995

Main menu

Sub menu

Real Plans for Putting People to Work

August 20, 2011

Ironically, just as government-spurred technology opened up prospects of greater wealth for all, an anti-government movement took hold, making sure most benefits went to the rich while leaving millions unemployed and the economy a wreck. Michael Winship lists ideas for putting some jobless back to work.

By Michael Winship

I like to ask friends about the oddest summer job they ever had.

One talks about how he used to don a rubber suit every morning at a Sylvania electronics plant in Syracuse, New York, and climb into a tank, where he dipped television tubes into some sort of mercury solution. He now moonlights as a thermometer.

Another spent a summer walking from floor to floor of a Manhattan skyscraper. His job was to take a long stick and un-jam the mail chute that ran alongside the elevator banks from the highest floor of the building to the bottom.

When he reached the basement, he took the elevator back to the top and started all over again, a Sisyphean postman.

A third worked in a factory that canned orange juice concentrate. In the process of filtering for impurities, the pulp was removed from the juice.

But lots of people insisted on the authentic taste and texture of pulp in their o.j., so my friend’s job was to sit with an ice pick and an enormous frozen block of pulp. As cans of concentrate came by on a conveyor belt, he’d chip off a bit and throw it in.

Much of that kind of summer work doesn’t exist these days for teenagers or anyone else, not only because of our snail-like jobless recovery, but also the simple reality that technology has kissed goodbye to so many of our relatively mindless, rote occupations.

My first college summer job was working at The New Republic magazine, where I was in charge of compiling the publication’s semi-annual index, a deadly duty that required a typewriter and piles of index cards on which were noted subjects, authors, dates, etc.

I then spent several days taping them onto long sheets of legal paper which were shipped off to the printer. My first published work.

Today, computers compile and collate that kind of data in nanoseconds. Good for them and us, I guess, but at least it was a job when I needed one.

Technology, outsourcing, the colossal economic meltdown of 2008 — according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in June, there were 4.5 out-of-work men and women for every available job.

That’s down slightly from 4.6 to 1 in May, but “still extremely high,” reported Heidi Shierholz of the progressive Economic Policy Institute. “June marks two-and-a-half years straight that the job seeker’s ratio has been substantially above 4-to-1… [That means] for three out of four unemployed workers, there are simply no jobs.”

She continues, “Unfortunately, instead of helping the unemployment situation, the debt ceiling deal … will slow growth and make joblessness worse.”

Gene Robinson of The Washington Post concurs and adds: “The Republican solution has been to eliminate jobs rather than create them. Last month, the economy added 117,000 jobs — a performance so weak that unemployment changed little.

“The private sector actually added 154,000 jobs, but the public sector lost 37,000 jobs as Republicans continue to impose an austerity program at an inopportune moment.”

Republican House members even oppose House Democratic Caucus Chairman John Larson’s proposal to set up a joint select committee on job creation, with representatives from both parties, similar to the new, debt deal super-committee that’s supposed to carve at least $1.2 trillion out of the deficit.

Speaker John Boehner’s spokesman says it “sounds like a scheme for more of the same failed ‘stimulus’ government spending,” but as Gene Robinson noted, “The GOP seems to believe that a federal, state or local job somehow isn’t a ‘real’ job. I’ll bet most Americans know otherwise.”

Because there actually are lots of solid proposals beyond the Republicans’ broken record of more tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, deregulation and continued exploitation of fossil fuels — “their mantra,” as Wall Street exec and former Treasury official Steven Rattner writes, of “repeal and retrenchment, devoid of new initiatives or a positive agenda.”

There are jobs to be had, jobs for the creating, even good ones, if Washington can just pull its head out of … the hole it’s dug for itself.

But just as a starting point of reference, for all the GOP denigration of TARP, actions by the Federal Reserve and the Obama stimulus, according to a recent report issued by the non-partisan policy group Demos, “It’s important to remember that we dodged a far more lethal bullet.

“The Great Recession could have turned into another Great Depression. The fact that it did not is attributable to the federal government’s forceful macroeconomic intervention in late 2008 and early 2009.

“Economists Alan Blinder and Mark Zandi (one a former Clinton appointee to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, and the other a former economic advisor to Senator John McCain) have estimated that the nation’s unemployment rate would have reached 16 percent rather than its actual 10.1 percent in the absence of this intervention.”

The report, “Back to Work: A Public Jobs Proposal for Economic Recovery,” written by Rutgers law and economics professor Philip Harvey, recommends an approach that “doesn’t require us to wait for the economy to recover in order to put people back to work.

“It puts people back to work as a way of nourishing the recovery. It’s a strategy for producing a job-led recovery rather than the jobless recovery we have been experiencing so far.

“The recovery strategy … is conceptually simple: Create jobs for the unemployed directly and immediately in public employment programs that produce useful goods and services for the public’s benefit.

“What this does for the unemployed is obvious. They get decent work while they wait for the recession to run its course. … Benefits delivered … trickle up to the private sector, inducing private sector job creation that supplements the immediate employment effect of the job creation program itself.”

A million temporary jobs in a federally administered, direct jobs creation program — jobs in childcare, eldercare, education, public health and housing, construction and maintenance, recreation and the arts. And as many as 414,000 jobs created outside the program.

Annual cost in program spending: $46.4 billion. Actual net cost, taking into account revenues and savings: only $28.6 billion. How? For a fuller explanation, you can read the complete Demos report at:http://www.demos.org/pubs/BackToWork.pdf. (Full disclosure: I’m a fellow at Demos.)

By the way, Harvey adds, “We currently need about 8.2 million more jobs to reduce the nation’s unemployment rate to 4.5%. Creating that many jobs in a program like the one described … would require a net increase in federal spending of about $235 billion during the first year. …

“If the Bush-era tax cuts had been allowed to expire at the end of 2010, the federal government would have collected about $295 billion in additional revenue during 2011. This would have been more than enough to cover the cost of the job program.”

Aspects of the report’s proposals are mirrored by legislation soon to be introduced by Illinois Democratic Rep. Jan Schakowsky — the Emergency Jobs to Restore the American Dream Act.

Over two years, her plan would cost $227 billion and would be paid for by tax increases for those earning more than $1 million and $1 billion, closing corporate tax loopholes and ending subsidies for big oil. She says such programs as a School Improvement Corps, a Park Improvement Corps, a Community Corps, and the Neighborhood Heroes Corps, among other such New Deal-echoing creations, would create 2.2 million jobs and decrease unemployment by 1.3 percent.

Before you uncase your dueling pistols or put quill to parchment in an angry letter to the Times, for those of the right and center who seethe that Rep. Schakowsky’s plan veers too close to the days of FDR or even the sunny side of Bolshevism, there’s also a proposal floating about from the Alliance of American Manufacturing, a coalition of leading manufacturers and the United Steelworkers, that focuses on private sector job creation. One manufacturing job, they say, supports four or five others.

Among its provisions, according to AAM’s executive director Scott N. Paul: a national infrastructure bank leveraging capital for transportation and energy projects (a similar proposal is favored by President Obama); reshaping the tax code “in a revenue neutral way to provide incentives for job creation and investment,” including R&D tax credits and lower tax rates for manufacturing in America; “buy America” provisions for all federal spending; expediting small business loans; and shifting “some education investment to rebuilding our vocational and technical skills.”

I especially like this one: “Kick any CEO off of federal advisory boards or jobs councils who has: (1) not created net new American jobs over the past five years, or (2) is expanding the company’s foreign workforce at a faster rate than its domestic workforce. Replace them with CEOs who are committed to investing in America. Shame is a good motivator.”

The President will make a major speech on jobs shortly after Labor Day. According to the Associated Press, “It is likely to include tax cuts to help the middle class, a build-up-America construction program that goes beyond any infrastructure proposal Obama has had already, and targeted help for the particularly worrisome group of people who have remained unemployed for many months in a row.”

All good, but unfortunately, if the past is any indication, what President Obama proposes will not be as bold or far-reaching as many of the ideas presented above.

It certainly won’t include my personal favorite, as suggested by Steve Benen at Washington Monthly‘s “Political Animal” blog: “Have the White House take the several hundred letters GOP lawmakers have sent to the executive branch since 2009, asking for public investments, and let President Obama announce he’ll gladly fund all of the Republicans’ requests that have not yet been filled.

“This is especially important when it comes to infrastructure, a sector in which GOP members have pleaded for more investment in their areas. …

“If these Republican lawmakers have identified worthwhile projects in need of government spending, which they themselves insist will boost the economy, why not start spending the money GOP officials want to see spent?”

Why not indeed? Alas, such an idea runs smack into more deficits: a deficit of irony among Republicans, certainly, but worse, a deficit of commitment and vision from a White House which until now at least, has been more focused on the pragmatic middle, despite a gainsaying opposition that yields nothing.

Still, as Benen writes, “When Republicans say ‘no jobs, no way,’ at least the nation will be able to see where both parties stand, and then choose accordingly next year.” Amen.

Michael Winship is senior writing fellow at Demos, president of the Writers Guild of America, East, and former senior writer of “Bill Moyers Journal” on PBS.

Post navigation

3 comments for “Real Plans for Putting People to Work”

There is one thing that will always increase job hiring…………..low cost labor…….this is true at all levels of the business world. The last national level demonstration of this theory was when NAFTA opened the doors of Mexico and Canada to emigrants both legal and illegal. This open door policy brought hoards of eager workers across the border which created one of our nation’s largest housing boom. However, being uncontrolled, an excess of building caused an unnatural demands on our banking system. And to make it worst, 10 million workers and their families remained in the US compounding our problems. So, where am I going with this article? It just might be possible to turn this negative into a positive………….. What if we were able to take this alienated labor force and use it to stimulate the job market! Think about it …… we can’t effectively export 15 million people after the barn door was left open by greedy business practices for so long……. Why not use this work force to make our country as strong if not stronger than it ever was? These are not undesirable people. They are industrious, basically honest and law biding, and want a better life than they were born into. These are the type of people that can put a backbone in our economy! They are willing to sacrifice to better themselves and their family. Sure they work for less than we are accustomed to. What’s wrong with that? Every business needs a majority of ground level employees for manufacturing and processes. With the hiring of these ground level employees the business will need higher level employees at the supervision and administrative levels. So, how do we make this happen? By developing a program that allows these alienated people to sign up for the right to work in our country as long as they : register , pay taxes to our government, and obey all laws while they are here. We don’t have to give them Citizenship, just a right to work! If we do this, we will add 10 million workers to our economy, reap the benefit of taxes from 10 million workers, bring millions of unemployed US citizen into the labor force because of business growth, and have these alienated people pay for the many citizen benefits they are using such as: schools, medical, and social services. They might not be given Voting rights , and all the Protection that a Citizen processes, but I know they would be satisfied to have a job and the ability to provide for their family in the World’s greatest country!

On technology eliminating boring jobs.. One time I was given a tour of a recently automated pretzel-making factory. Not a person could be seen anywhere as the machines disgorged streams of perfect pretzels. Eventually we entered a room with a number of people in it. They were smashing pretzels with large rubber hammers. I asked what was going on here, and was told that the new machines were so efficient that they never broke any pretzels, and the company had a significant portion of its sales devoted to selling bags of ‘broken pretzels’, so they had to hire people to come in every day and break pretzels.

.

Sherwood Ross

August 29, 2011 at 10:27 am

Mr. Winship: Thanks for an insightful article. By the way, any kin to a famous UPI editor?

Comments are closed.

Donate

Thank You for Your Support!

If anyone wanted a thank-you gift from the spring fund drive and it did not arrive, please contact us at consortnew@aol.com. For a while longer, we will continue to offer -- for donations of $150 or more -- the Gary Webb movie "Kill the Messenger" DVD and a CD of Webb and Robert Parry discussing the Contra-cocaine scandal. Just follow up your donation with an email to consortnew@aol.com, telling us where to send the gift. Thanks again.